Creativity Through Memetic Crossovers
Creativity Through Memetic Crossovers
Prelude to “Triangulations,” a Series of Essays at the Intersection of René Girard’s Scapegoat Mechanism and Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle
The pandemic was psychedelic.
People who promote psychedelic drugs liken them to spreading fresh snow over your mind's deep neural furrows so that you can be free to start new patterns of thought. But like any drug, psychedelics have their own risks and contraindications. There are milder and safer options for giving your brain a creative shake-up. In the book The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron recommends "Artist Dates," which are solo adventures of trying out something new and interesting. I call my version the "serendipity bike ride:" I casually meander downtown and explore intriguing places and food I see on the map or that I come across.
I've encountered two practices with a similar effect to Artist Dates and perhaps to psychedelics as well. They lie in the two extremes of replicability. One is undergoing a pandemic, which is difficult and undesirable to replicate. The other way is the memetic crossovers I employ below and in the upcoming essays. I also discovered it during the pandemic, but replicating it is much easier and safer. The COVID era was an extremely long Artist Date, wherein my city was transformed into its zombie apocalypse version. Perhaps the encounter with strangeness amid the familiar makes your mind open to changes, and the pandemic was like an Artist Date with strangeness dialed up to 11.
That strangeness broke down siloes in my mind, leading to unexpected fusions. For instance, I was preparing for a master's thesis on cacao genomics before the pandemic began. That academic interest was in a section in my mind far away from my semi-archived skill set from years of leading international projects in a couple of Fortune 50 companies. The chaos and strangeness of the pandemic made these two mental sections leak into each other. I initiated a project that eventually got named "Project Accessible Genomics." In ten months, I built an international volunteer team of scientists and students, and we enabled a lab in a peripheral city in the developing world to sequence SARS-CoV-2 using a low-cost and portable genetic sequencer. This was the first time this had happened (governments and universities usually lead initiatives like this, not volunteers), so CNN featured us (my mother was so proud to see me on TV). I relay the project management inside story of Accessible Genomics in my book How to Turn Ideas Into Reality.
Project Accessible Genomics was a crossover between my academic interest in genomics and my practical abilities in project execution. Let me share two other examples of creativity through memetic crossovers. One is the crossover between genomics and “antifragility” below. The other is the upcoming three essays, which lie at the intersection of René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism and Venkatesh Rao's The Gervais Principle.
The crossover between genomics and antifragility below is also a foundation for understanding René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism, which we will dive into in Part I of the Triangulations series. Even if you are familiar with evolution and antifragility, you might still find this interesting. I bet that you have never heard the crossover album of these two rockstar ideas!
Life is Antifragile Information
Both non-living things and living organisms store information. For instance, a rock scientist ("petrologist," it turns out) can extract information from a pebble. Its chemical composition can give her insights into its origin and history. Living organisms also carry data—massive and digital—in their genomes. The difference is that the information stored in non-living things gets lost over time (e.g., the pebble eventually erodes into dust), while the genome retains its fidelity across generations. If we look at the history of life, organisms have become better and better at transmitting information to the future, from one-celled bodies to bodies with multi-planetary potential. In other words, information stored in non-living things falls within the spectrum of fragile (easily destroyed) to robust (difficult to destroy). In contrast, information stored in genomes is antifragile, to use Nassim Taleb's neologism.
Antifragility describes systems that benefit from shocks, volatility, and stressors, as opposed to merely resisting them (robust) or being vulnerable to them (fragile). An antifragile business, for instance, can take advantage of economic instability instead of just surviving it or succumbing to it. In the case of genomic information, the stressors are death and its imperfect ability to make copies of itself.
Let me highlight three components of this antifragile system of life. In Part I of Triangulations, we will compare this with the antifragility of our current culture.
Information uses matter to store itself: the genome
Information uses matter to create bodies: living organisms
Bodies survive, reproduce, and adapt to various environments, producing better-adapted genomes: evolution
In this system, disorder and death have become tools for life to perpetuate itself. Imperfect replication of this genomic data (mutation) allows for the possibility of change and of bodies that are better at survival and reproduction.
Genomes are records of truth: they are the source code of bodies that thrive in specific environments. Similarly, a culture is antifragile because it is based on truth and because it continuously revises its understanding of truth based on what it learns from stressors like its own failures. This idea will be fleshed out in Part I of Triangulations. The other key lesson we will carry as we move from life to culture is evolution. We will see in Part I how René Girard uses the evolutionary feature of archaic societies to explain cultural universals like ritual sacrifice.
Explorations.ph
The crossover above between genomics and antifragility also happened during the pandemic, while philosophizing about the virus on Twitter. I'd sound like I'm full of myself if I admit that writing that Twitter thread blew my mind. This would be true If I considered those ideas as my own. But after reading Liz Gilbert's Big Magic years ago, I've let go of ownership of ideas or thinking that I am their source. Ideas are discovered through explorations like the crossover above and in the upcoming three essays. I'm so excited to share them with you because developing their drafts also blew my mind!
I recently renamed this newsletter to "Explorations.ph" (which is also its new domain). This captures the kind of essays I envision publishing here: unexplored ideas beyond the training data of LLMs and beyond my personal known universe. As explained in the post that launched this current season, we will eventually end up (I hope!) with a crossover of René Girard’s ideas and Philippine history and culture (dot ph is the country's top-level domain).
I invite you to join me in this journey to unmapped territories by subscribing (if you haven't yet) and to initiate crossovers between the ideas in our minds by commenting. That exchange might also end up being slightly psychedelic.
Thanks to
and Raymond Ng for reading and giving feedback on earlier versions of this series of essays, and to my Write of Passage homies , , , and for helping shape this essay into its current form.Plug: The Three-City Problem of Meaningless Work is now available as an ebook and in paperback.
